There's a classic New Yorker cartoon picturing a bunch of big
shaggy monsters at a cocktail party. One of them asks the one in the
middle, "So, we were wondering...where do you get your ideas?"

The joke, of course, is that no artist can truly respond to such an
absurd clich&eacute. So it was not without horror that, when I asked
Trent Reznor that question (in so many words), I could
practically feel that slimy query crawl out of my mouth. But it was too
late. I had already asked the question -- out loud! -- and it had to be
answered. To Reznor's great credit, he didn't say "Well, they fall out of
my ass," nor did he pimp-slap me on the spot. He actually (gasp!)
answered the question, and therein lies my tale.

Let me arrange a little set & setting for you: It was a dark
and not-so-stormy night, six years ago. February 11, 1990, to be exact,
on the patio of a notorious shithole dive called Lola's in Houston,
Texas. Reznor had just finished a soundcheck at a rather small (formerly
gay) disco called Numbers; "Down In It" had just cracked the pop charts,
and Nine Inch Nails were in the midst of their first real tour. A couple
of local music critics and I had cornered him at the club, and he
amicably agreed to let us drive him over to Lola's (where we proceeded
to get faced, and he didn't drink at all). After we (not Trent) got good
and toasted, we turned on the microcassette recorders and let an
interview ensue. Part of it went like this:

Q:You've come up with an album that seems awfully
substantial and weighty as a debut. Who are your contemporaries, or what
kind of ground were you trying to work?

Trent Reznor: Well, I'd always been a keyboard player primarily, so
it was gonna have some sort of electronic feel to it, and I like
electronic music. But I like more aggressive electronic music, à
la Ministry / Skinny Puppy-type stuff. It gets this "industrial"
tag now, which is not entirely accurate, for them or me. Some people
have this impression that I'm living in a factory or something
ridiculous like that. It's just that, to get aggressive sounds on a
synthesizer, a lot of times you go to metallic sounds or distorted
sounds...the equivalent of a metal guitar in rock music, you know."

Q: Well, you know where they get the "factory," it's the "Factory"
bands, the New Orders...are there any British influences at all in your
music?"

TR: (Slightly irritated) Yeah, like...I get asked often, you know,
"What's your influence?" and "Who do you listen to when you write?" It's
like, I know who I'm listening to, and I know who I'm ripping off
idea-wise and stuff, but I think a lot of people don't want to admit to
somebody that's out now as being a big reference, you know? My
influences are not The Beatles or The Doors or any of those fuckers;
man, I hate 'em, I'm sick of 'em, they're dead, they're gone, it's over
with. Skinny Puppy: Yes, an influence. Ministry: Yeah, they've been an
influence. The The, Matt Johnson's lyrics, definitely have been
an influence.

Q: Maybe the first two Human League albums?

TR: Yeah...I mean, I like...

Q: Before they went pop.

TR: Yeah...yeah, in a sense, yeah. I mean, I've listened to all of
it, so subconsciously it's in there....

Your humble narrator must interject at this point that the Human
League reference was a loaded question. At that time I was fronting
a synthpop band playing local clubs...and we were heavily influenced by
The Human League. As the singer, it never occurred to me to ditch the
Philip Oakey (Human League) British-style crooning and adopt a "Dig It"
(Skinny Puppy), menacing sort of stance. But when Pretty Hate Machine
hit the stands, it pretty much blew our thinking wide open. I mean,
here was a cat tapping the best of both of these worlds. Gary Numan had
shone light on the path of hard guitar mixed with synthesizers a decade
earlier; New York's own Suicide proved that synths could be punk; Ministry demonstrated the effectiveness of
taking hardcore metal and sampling/looping the shit out of it on top of
a disco beat. But, with the debut of Nine Inch Nails, the Final Solution
was finally clear: Vulnerable, introspective intelligence, married to pop
hooks and edgy synths. Toss in some guitar crunch for familiarity, and
you're listening to The Future.

But back to the past: My impressions of seeing NIN that evening
are still quite vivid. Dressed like any other hardcore Cleveland band of
the day (obligatory all black, leather jackets, combat boots), the
visuals were unremarkable. But a peculiar aspect of NIN was their
relative timelessness: It wasn't unthinkable that, if one were to walk
into one of the chatsubo bars of William Gibson's gritty cyberpunk novels in
the year 2020, NIN would be the band on stage. There was a sincerely
futuristic aura about NIN that I hadn't felt since the earliest days of
The Human League: none of your poncy, costumey Gary Numan shtick. Void
of the overindulgent posturings of Ministry or the mock-horror dramatics
of Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails struck a
strangely familiar chord. I loved early Human League. I loved Nine Inch
Nails.

So when I read the February 1996 SPIN interview with Reznor
["Sympathy For The Devil"], in which he mentions the Human League
without prompting, I almost fell off my chair. "The excitement of
hearing a Human League track," recalls Trent, "and thinking,
that's all machines, there's no drummer. That was my calling."

The vast majority of Gentle Readers will equate the Human
League with "Don't You Want Me" teenybopper fodder. But, just as there
was a time when Adam Ant (adamant, geddit?) was cool (before
the now-embarrassing Pirate phase), so too were the Human League, before
they added the chicks for eye candy and were abandoned by their real
keyboard players. The Human League began as punk flourished in 1977, but
they rebelled by experimenting with instrumental electronic music. It's
difficult to remember today how inventive and innovative the Human
League were...particularly in light of their current pop/dance status.

That said, allow me to reference two (now obscure) Human League releases
as points of Nine Inch Interest: their first two albums,
Reproduction (1979) and Travelogue (1980). These are both
seminal synthesizer classics, reissued on CD in 1988 [and more recently
available as imports]. In hindsight, and listening to them now, the
similarities between NIN and the Human League are quite startling. The
same-ness isn't as superficial as, say, comparisons to Skinny Puppy's
shock treatments, or Ministry's hard-edged pounding. Rather, it's the use
of a cool, sometimes Kraftwerk-like detachment...the juxtaposition
of emotions and intellect with synthetics and harshness...and using that
dichotomy to display (or illustrate) a certain alienation, a certain
angst. That's the most obvious of Human League influences upon Reznor's
compositions. Also undoubtedly influential was the Human League's
avoidance of the downbeat, funk flavor of the day, favoring the same
half-tempo, dirgelike, mother's-heartbeat sort of repetition that's also
found in most NIN tracks. As Kraftwerk or even Joy
Division have shown, an almost erotic futurism may be exploited
that way.

Writing about music, as one wag once put it, is like dancing
about architecture. But there are some purely lyrical similarities that,
as Trent said, may be subconsciously "in there": a sort of educated
angst that permeates and bridges NIN with early Human League. From
Travelogue's "Life Kills": "You know you feel you might be dying,
as the breath rasps in and out of your burning throat," Phil Oakey warbles;
"No one's awake to tell you life kills." Or from "Crow And A Baby": "Now
I want all the fathers dead / Find the fathers of this world; treat them
as a fatal foe / Put them in the deepest hole, then cover the pit with
snow / I'm just trying to tell you what you'll come up against if you
venture from my side / If you think you're so mature, you will end up in
a field / You will be someone's manure, mushrooms growing from your back,
feeding some damn carrion bird / Do you want to contribute to the
corruption of the world?" NIN-ish indeed.

But the stunning similarities come into play when examining the music
itself. The first giveaway, on both Reproduction and
Travelogue, is the quirky, eerie track intros...definitely
NIN-ish. Even when remembering that this music is edging toward twenty
years old, tracks like "Being Boiled" and "Dreams of Leaving" are obvious precursors to
NIN. The former track is unquestionably an embryonic "Down In It"; the
latter, with its percolating synth and a stab of sawtooth noise for
effect (and where Oakey sings of "the currency of pain"), mines the same
territory. Or consider "The Black Hit of
Space," which bears the same dissonance and distortion as anything
on The Downward Spiral. To be sure, Phil Oakey's somewhat
pretentious, rigid vocals have nothing to do with Reznor's style. But
conceptually and musically, even without allowing for the aural
generation gap in between, few of these tracks would be out of place on
any NIN effort. (In fact, one rare Human League instrumental release,
The Dignity of Labour Pts. 1-4 from 1979, eerily predates the
moody, ambient underpinnings found on Further Down The Spiral.
Here, too, the ancestral origin of that which is NIN is quite clear).

This Human League material I've referenced will prove nearly
impossible to locate; I've included some sound snippets from
Travelogue (below) just so you can get the gist of the influence.
(Warning: Purchasing the early Human League oeuvre will not produce the
same empathetic reaction as Sister Machine Gun or Stabbing Westward; it's good music, but
dated, so don't expect to dig it offhand.) In short, though, I found
Trent's acknowledgment of the group to be of great interest...if only
because there were pivotal moments and aspects of the Human League that
fired my own musical muse. Inside the more fertile mind of a Trent
Reznor, and colorized by better technologies, this Human League influence
was profoundly fused with the industrial/punk Wax
Trax mindset of the late '80s. And thus evolved the Nine Inch
Nails sound that all these nutty kids are going gaga for today. Isn't it
kind of funny how everything works out?

Sound samples from 1980's Travelogue LP: Sun .au format,
7.4kHz, approximately 30 seconds each (editor's note: set to "2's Comp"
in SoundMachine -- use the last button in the first row of buttons on the
right):

1. Trent loves pointing out that the intro beat to "Closer" was
lifted from Iggy Pop's "Nightclubbing" (off the David Bowie-produced 1977 LP The Idiot); I've
read that in at least four interviews. Interestingly enough, the Human
League first covered "Nightclubbing" on their Holiday 80 EP
(which also appears on the Travelogue CD).

2. Witness PHM's liner notes, where Trent lists Jane's
Addiction, Prince (formally credited only on the Australian
"Head Like A Hole" single), Public Enemy, This Mortal Coil, and Success (Screaming Trees
U.K.). [who?!]

3. Have you heard the early PHM demos? Some of those versions
(particularly the unreleased "Maybe Just Once") are extremely close to
later Human League material...and also demonstrate how available
technology (or the limits of it) influences different artists in similar
ways. Get ahold of Purest Feeling and Demos & Remixes bootleg CDs for this
must-have stuff.

4. I found Trent's Matt Johnson reference enlightening. I mean,
consider PHM's "The Only Time"...the best song The The never recorded! Musically, and especially
lyrically, it's pure Infected-era Matt Johnson.

5. Tuck Remington's Nine Inch Nails photobook (Omnibus
Press, 1995) has an interesting paragraph: "Human League's Billboard No.
1 'Don't You Want Me Baby' [sic] in 1982 paled for [Reznor] when
compared to the cold and remote attraction of their earlier experimental
and arcane material written by the original line-up. This harder-edged
electronic music captivated Reznor and, in his own words, 'suddenly
music started to make sense.'"

7. Oh, and that club Numbers that NIN played at back in '90? Trent
pulled the band back there on December 2 last year, having just come off
the Outside tour with Bowie...and treated about 700 of us to one hell of
a good show before returning home to his new digs in New Orleans.